IPhone

Interactive book apps may not yet have set the world on fire, but there is at least one place for them—as an adjunct to video games. On January 28, 2015, Industrial Toys LLC released Midnight Rises, an interactive graphic novel application for iOS. The e-comic serves as a prelude to Midnight Star, a mobile shooter game which Industrial Toys LLC released for iOS today. (Both applications are expected to come to Android “sometime soon.”)
Midnight Rises was written by John Scalzi, with art by Mike Choi and music by Serj Tankian. The first chapter is free; the next two are 99...

Hey, guess what? People read on their smartphones. That’s the thrust of a piece in Wired that talks about how the smartphone has been a godsend for long-form written journalism. Where people used to read their newspapers on the subway, now they read their smartphones—and despite the predictions of those who said such devices would destroy our attention span, the evidence is pretty good that smartphone users are able to concentrate enough to read articles thousands of words long in one go. The Atlantic recently reported that a gorgeously illustrated 6,200-word story on BuzzFeed—which likewise...

Apart from all the little features it’s swiping from Android (finally, widgets, custom keyboards, and cross-app sharing APIs!), the new iPhone OS 8 includes one little feature that Mark Coker of Smashwords believes will be a “game changer.” For the first time, iBooks will be bundled directly into every new iOS device sold. This might not seem like a big deal at first—iBooks has, after all, been available for four years to anyone who wants to download it—but never underestimate the laziness barrier. People who weren’t that “into” e-books might never have bothered to grab it on their...

Smartphones might be good for e-reading, but soon they’ll be able to read your face, too. Remember the uproar when Facebook announced plans to add face recognition identity tagging to its photos? It turned out only to be meant to tag people who you’d friended already, but to hear most people you’d have thought they were going to have their identities revealed to total strangers. Well, CNET Australia now reports on a forthcoming app for Android, iOS, and Google Glass that could reveal your identity to total strangers. Called NameTag, the app will allow users to snap photos...

Remember that “Typo” Bluetooth iPhone keyboard case backed by Hollywood’s Ryan Seacrest? It essentially grafts a BlackBerry style keyboard onto an iPhone. Well, it turns out that BlackBerry is not amused that the Typo is effectively a rip-off of the iconic keyboard design from their BlackBerry phones. The layout and styling of the keys is remarkably similar, after all…so BlackBerry is filing suit for infringement of their design. As Matthew Panzarino points out on TechCrunch, it seems unlikely that any money they get out of this even if they win will be enough to slow Blackberry’s slide into obscurity...

Here’s a GigaOm article by Kevin C. Tofel looking at why smartphones are getting bigger and bigger, in seeming reversal of the trend of technology making things constantly smaller. It used to be that the iPhone’s 3.5” screen was considered the ideal size for smartphones. The iPhone was made that size because it was the largest the phone could be for most people to be able to reach all corners of the screen with their thumb when holding it in their hand. But screen size crept up to 4 inches, now 5-inch screens are considered normal for many...

I finished reading Fred Vogelstein’s book Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, which I mentioned in my post yesterday. I quite enjoyed it. Even though I read the news reports of the events it describes as they happened, you don’t get the big picture until you read a book like this, that looks back and puts everything together in the proper context. The book covers the development of the iPhone and Android phones, touches on the iPad and what it meant, goes over the Apple vs. Samsung patent lawsuit, and then wraps up...

The Atlantic is carrying an excerpt from Fred Vogelstein’s book Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. I found it interesting enough that I actually bought the book and have been reading through it, and will probably have more to say on that in a day or so. This except, from Chapter 2, talks about Google’s reaction to Apple’s iPhone launch. Essentially, they were poleaxed by Jobs’s demonstration. (How little they knew—Chapter 1 covered how that first iPhone demonstration was carefully stage-managed to disguise the fact that their demonstrator phone was half-baked with a...

Here’s an example of a game company doing something pretty clever with mobile technology to increase engagement on its PC game. Gearbox, the wildly creative company behind Borderlands 2, has released a free mobile app for iOS and Android that scans UPC or QR bar codes and associates them with a randomly-generated loot item from that game. The first time a code is scanned, it randomly generates a loot item; thenceforth, that code is associated specifically with that item so people can tell their friends what to look for. It’s completely agnostic with regard to the price of...

The new version of the Voice Dream reader app, a superb iOS text-to-speech app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, can now play audiobooks, too.
Even at $10, costlier than the typical app, Voice Dream is a Buy, capital B, at the Apple App Store.
Voice Dream 2.9.2 can handle zipped MP3s as well as audiobooks in Daisy, thanks to help from a Swiss library organization, and navigation and general usability are excellent, just as in the regular text-to-speech mode for ePub files and others.
Dozen of optional voices in common languages work with the app, and my favorite is the UK-accented “Peter” voice...

When most of us aren’t satisfied with the current state of mobile technology, we don’t have any recourse but to hope that someone comes up with something better. But if you’re a high-powered, wealthy Hollywood go-getter, you have a few other options. GigaOm and AllThingsD are reporting that Hollywood exec Ryan Seacrest was fed up with having to carry two cell phones with him all the time—one for typing and another one for everything else. He just couldn’t get used to the on-screen keyboard in his “everything else” phone, and needed a physical thumb board to type usefully....

Oh noes! They’re killing the PC! Mass computing devices face the dark future of tablets with restricted operating systems that limit what you can do and what apps you can install! We must all run about in panic!
Except…no, I don’t think that’s right. The article I linked above on ZDNet notes:
Here's what I see happening: Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all want us to buy appliances, not PCs. An appliance is a closed box. It can only run the operating system they stick you with. It will only run the applications they approve for it. Apple and Microsoft are particularly strict...